The dream of time travel

From HG Wells to the latest Big Brother challenge, time travel has sparked the popular imagination. Now, an American scientist has broken his silence about his dream of time travel, with a book documenting his life-long struggle to build a time machine. Time travel has long held a fascination for many of us. The idea that we could use science to see the past and the future has been with us since HG Wells penned The Time Machine at the end of the 19th Century. Since then, sci-fi comics and Hollywood have built an entire time travel industry. Today, man is successfully probing deep into the mysteries of the universe. Can he penetrate the greatest mystery of all - time itself? One young boy, growing up in the 1950s in the Bronx in New York, was especially interested in these tales. Ronald Mallett was just 10 when his father died of a sudden heart attack. And it was in science fiction that he found solace.

"Just about a year after he died, I came across HG Wells' book The Time Machine. And that is what saved me from going into a total depression - because I had this inspiration," says Mr Mallett. "I thought: if I could build a time machine, the way HG Wells had suggested, then I should be able to go back into the past; and if I could go back into the past, I could see my father again and warn him about what was going to happen to him, and maybe save his life. So that became an obsession for me." More than 50 years later Ronald Mallett has learned a lot more about science. He's now a professor of physics at the University of Connecticut. But time hasn't changed him. He still wants to build a time machine, and is seeking funding for his so-called Space-Time Twisting by Light project. Of course, building such a machine was never going to be simple. And it isn't.